No more torrents will help more content to be shared, render "copyright watchdogs" more toothless

The Pirate Bay has long been synonymous with one thing -- torrents. The world's largest torrent site has had more than its fair share of legal headaches [1][2][3] over the years for promoting the ubiquitous file-sharing mechanism. Consequentially on Feb. 29 in will be taking what on the surface appears to be a mind-blowing move -- deleting all torrents hosted directly on the site, which are being actively shared by more than 10 individuals.

But in reality this move is not as mind-blowing and drastic a departure from the site's operational model as some are thinking/hoping/fearing.

The site will continue to host the content, where possible, via magnet links. All new content will be hosted via magnetic links.

The Pirate Bay can now be compressed to a 90 MB torrent-free site, for easy hosting. Under the new scheme scores of new users will be able to host free proxy servers for The Pirate Bay, helping it escape takedown attempts, local firewalls, or ISP restrictions.

At the same time The Pirate Bay washes its hands of any of the actual process of file-sharing. It is simply hosting magnet links -- links to torrents which share the same unique hash value. In that regard, thousands, if not millions of users will be privately hosting the scores of torrents that make up The Pirate Bay users worldwide know and love.

And it will be far harder for lawyers and regulators to pin wrongdoing on The Pirate Bay -- assuming that the members of the international judicial committee understand how the technology works and are willing to give a fair trial, at least. In short, magnet links are the future of filesharing and The Pirate Bay's decision to force their adoption is a sound one in terms of its future.

In essence it will be impossible for the RIAA or MPAA to put millions of Americans in prison or fine them. So ultimately, magnet links and other new technologies may force the RIAA, MPAA, and government to abandon traditional enforcement of file-sharing. Thus the groups' long-standing dream of taking down The Pirate Bay's torrents has just become their worst nightmare.

It should be interesting how the self-proclaimed "anti-piracy" advocates by day, for-profit pirates by night globally react to this new technological marvel.

I don't think they will get any ONE when it comes to torrents.At least not in a country (like Sweden) where you have to download/share a lot of movies and songs.That is because if the "pirate hunters finds you in the peer list for one torrent, then they can't tell what other torrents your are seeding/leching from.

They just have to randomly try to download different torrents until they stumble on a second torrent that you may seed at the moment. If you occur in the list of peers, which most don't if it is a well-seeded torrent anyway.

So, if they don't find you actively downloading files via torrent when doing, for example, a search of a house for another crime and also find out that a person is downloading/seeding on a computer in the same house, as a case here in Sweden, then they CAN'T do anything about filesharing via torrents.One file is nothing!

That is, until they decide to let the ISP;s do a massive surveillance with packet inspection and so on. And still that would be very hard to administer for the millions and millions of users.

The filesharers that get caught are using dc++, kazaa and other services and are also kind of stupid to let the sharing folder be anything else than harmless files like Linux-distros and so on (which was something that could be used back when dc++ was popular).

This isn't about suing individuals. RIAA already stated that is not a viable option. They've lost a lot of money trying to do that. What that means is they would have made more money not suing pirates.

This is about torrent sites like TPB being shut down by governments. A magnet link is just a hash value. You see, TPB currently is hosting .torrent files which directly get you access to material. The hash value is not a torrent file. And it isn't "hosted" anywhere. And did you see the part where the entire site ends up being a 90MB database with some web interface scripts? They can literally provide a magnet link to TPB itself and let anyone host a mirror of it.